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Monday, July 18, 2011

Untold Story

At first glance, Untold Story looks like it would be some kind of Princess Diana biography, timed to release around what would have been her 50th birthday.

A closer look reveals that it's actually a novel exploring the premise that Princess Diana faked her own death to escape her celebrity and live a quiet, unassuming life in America. It sounds like pretty hokey territory until you realize that it's written by the fantastic Monica Ali. As a writer she has a way of drawing really rich, complex characters, and this novel is no different. The story develops in a way that made me forget any real-life Princess Diana comparisons and see it as a really interesting character study that manages to be funny and suspenseful in turns, and that nicely blurs the line between protagonist and antagonist.

After liking this book as much as I did, I was surprised to see so many negative reader reviews written about it on Amazon and BN.com. Taking a closer look, I realized that most of them seem to be written by Diana fanatics who didn't seem to fully get that this wasn't intended to be a biography or a piece of historical fiction. Case in point- one reviewer who, in all caps, expressed outrage that it would even be suggested that Diana would ever willingly "leave her boys". Hmmm. Perhaps the cover designer should have bumped up the words "a novel" by a few points?